WikiLeaks ousted from Amazon US

Homeland Security Senator badmouths Assange

Update: This story has been updated to show that contrary to some reports, Senator Lieberman's statement did not say that Amazon removed Wikileaks' mirrors in response to his inquiry.

WikiLeaks is no longer mirroring its trove of confidential US diplomatic cables on US-based servers run by Amazon.com, and according to US Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, when his office phoned Amazon to inquire about the WikiLeaks mirrors, Amazon said it had removed them.

Amazon did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. But Wikileaks confirms that it did not remove the servers on its own. "WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted," reads a post to the Wikileaks Twitter account. "Free speech the land of the free--fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe."

But on Wednesday, WikiLeaks mirrors disappeared from Amazon's service, according to Netcraft records. A DNS check now shows that WikiLeaks has reverted to servers run by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof, which has long hosted the site.

The cablegate site has been unavailable to many users, and this may have been related to its removal from Amazon.

According to a statement from Senator Joe Lieberman, his staff phoned Amazon to ask about the Wikileaks mirrors on AWS, and Amazon said it had taken them down. "This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the WikiLeaks website," Liberman said. "The company’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material."

WikiLeaks still uses a US-based domain name registrar (Dynadot) and a US-based DNS service (EveryDNS). ®